Category: Rants

Being shitty at running for president has worked out pretty well for Mike Huckabee when you think about it.
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Given that the sum total of his political achievements is winning the 2008 Iowa Caucus and being elected Governor of Dogpatch twice, the man is fabulously well-off. In 2008 and again in 2016 he has used other people's money to run for president not with the expectation of winning but to give priceless publicity to the Mike Huckabee Brand. And before you chuckle at that dismissively, remember just how lucrative Beltway Welfare can be.
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Speaking fees at right-wing events, AM Radio and Fox News hosting gigs, book deals, personal brand stuff on the internet…this man has no doubt been earning millions of dollars per year since leaving elected office in 2006. And it has been for remarkably easy work.

It's hard to say that running for president and getting creamed has not worked out very well for Mr. Huckabee and his family. That's why New York mag asking "Is Ben Carson Running for President?" is long overdue. As I've been saying for…well, years, I guess…the line between self-promotion and campaigning has long since become indistinct. These people who have zero chance of winning the nomination are hanging around for one reason, and it isn't because they like doing a debate every two weeks. Even those doing well like Carson and Trump aren't clearly Serious Candidates as opposed to two guys trolling. Trolling hard. As Chait states:

But now Carson actually is running for president. Or is he? It is hard to tell. Conservative politics are so closely intermingled with a lucrative entertainment complex that it is frequently impossible to distinguish between a political project (that is, something designed to result in policy change) and a money-making venture. Declaring yourself a presidential candidate gives you access to millions of dollars' worth of free media attention that can build a valuable brand. So the mere fact that Carson calls himself a presidential candidate does not prove he is actually running for president rather than taking advantage of the opportunity to build his brand.
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Indeed, it is possible to be actually leading the polls without seriously trying to win the presidency.

The system has become so ridiculous and the idea of personal branding through social media has become so pervasive and potentially lucrative that it is now impossible to determine who is running for president and who is running to build an empire of dolts easily parted from their cash. It is relatively easy to spot a career narcissist like Trump and wonder aloud if he is dumb enough to think he can win or if this is all an elaborate publicity stunt. That skepticism needs to be applied more broadly, though. 90% of the people running are suspect on that criteria. The professional campaigning industry abets this large scale grift too. What paid consultant is going to tell Bobby Jindal that he is a lost cause? There's free money to be had. Why get off the gravy train until absolutely necessary? Just keep pretending you're serious about getting elected, collect checks from cartoonishly rich donors and mouth-frothing old white people, and plot ways to convert the publicity into cold, hard cash when the tap finally runs dry. All you have to do is suffer through a few months of relatively light work. Everybody gets paid. Everybody wins.

This is what we've come to.

There are many institutional features, some entirely unique to the United States, that contribute to our abysmally low voter turnout. That low turnout is in turn a contributor to the election outcomes we live with. Two overlooked factors that help explain Tuesday's smattering of races across the country are the frequency of elections and the length of our campaign/election seasons. By a substantial margin, Americans are asked to come out to vote more regularly than citizens of any other democratic country. We have elections at the drop of a hat, thanks in part to our federal system in which statewide, local, and Federal offices are staggered and elected in different years depending on the state. General elections, municipal elections, recall elections, special elections to fill vacancies, runoff elections in majority-requirement jurisdictions, primary elections…the average American is asked to come out and vote several times per year. For an act in which most people are not especially interested or enthusiastic this is an effective death sentence. We barely care enough to vote in "major" elections like a presidential race or a midterm congressional election.
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By the time we get down to local and primary elections we're looking at turnout in the single digits of eligible voters in many places. When turnout is that low you know exactly what the electorate looks like: old, white, and cranky. And this is not unreasonable; who else but old, cantankerous white people have the time or inclination to pay a lot of attention to the Pigsknuckle County Board races? That hot race for Sanitation District Commission Seat 3B? That barn-burner of a school board contest?

Unfortunately these things, while not terribly interesting to most of us, are important. And we're usually too sick of politics to give them much thought when their turn comes.

The length of our campaigns is similarly fatiguing. The 2016 presidential race has been going on for roughly 3 months already, and the informal jockeying for even longer. We're already three months into an election campaign that culminates next November and we expect people to pay attention to and participate meaningfully in the 2015 elections – elections that most people don't even know exist? I am the first to revel in the joys of dumping on the civic capacities of the Average* American, but when it comes to the costs of voting and sheer fatigue I think we have a legitimate gripe.
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No other nation asks or expects people to pay attention to what has become one endless campaign cycle with regular exhortations to Get Out the Vote. I get paid to talk about American politics and even I get sick of the lack of ability to come up for air in this process. The nine-month long 2014 campaign barely ended before, after a break of a few months of unproductive Governing, states with 2015 races were flogging voters again. And the 2016 race didn't even wait until 2015 was over to not only begin but to reach the breaking point of sanity and overexposure.

This is the dilemma. Nobody is going to vote this often and pay this much attention to such a vast number of different elected offices and ballot issues unless their life consists literally of nothing but sitting in front of Fox News 24-7 and obsessively harassing the local newspaper's unpaid editorial intern. There are people who fit that description. And we really, really don't want them making our decisions for us.
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That is exactly what happens and will continue to happen in practice, though, since no amount of shaming or appeals to conscience will convince people with lives, shit jobs, family obligations, and a need to occasionally stop watching the news to preserve their mental health to vote this many times and consume this much OMG Election!!11!! stuff. It's like that fifth Red Bull of the day, the one at which your adrenal glands can be flogged no further and your body simply shuts down with fatigue and overstimulation.

It makes sense. It sucks that a lot of you didn't vote yesterday. It hardly makes you a bad person, though. It makes you a normal human being who has a limit, a limit that has been reached.

*modal

I'm unsure how much national press this has gotten – I suspect that having colleagues at University of Nebraska who are anti-capital punishment activists to boot has made me disproportionately aware of it – but Gov. Pete Ricketts' epic quest to find ways to kill death row inmates despite the lack of lethal injection drugs is like a modern day version of Moby Dick. Well, that's a rough analogy. The novel was a complex, brooding commentary on man's search for meaning. This is just a story about an asshole who wants to kill people so other, terrible people will like him more.
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As with every post in the history of Gin and Tacos that deals with capital punishment, let us remember the incontrovertible truth that politicians love the death penalty because it's the only way a bunch of paunchy, candy-ass white guys can look tough. Many death penalty opponents look at Ricketts as a perfect example of the way inmates' lives are used as fodder when elected officials need to shore up support with their old, white base. It's also a good example of political miscalculation and not knowing when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em – Ricketts has chosen to die upon this hill (so to speak) without having much of a strategy once his first steps didn't result in success. But more than anything the wrangling, legal and practical, over lethal injection pharmaceuticals is a black comedy skit on the illusion that killing people as the endpoint of a legal process made up of fallible, biased humans can be made Humane.

I am 100%, without exception opposed to capital punishment.

I also believe that if you're going to kill someone it doesn't make a hell of a lot of difference how you do it provided the infliction of suffering isn't one of the goals of the process. We like lethal injection because it's bloodless and doesn't create a gruesome scene. It looks, when it works properly, like someone calmly passing out and never waking up. Unfortunately for the states that continue to insist on using it, it's also not a particularly effective method. I see nothing valuable about the method. If you're going to kill people anything quick and reliable will do.
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Gunshot to the head. Long-drop hanging. Hell, why not the guillotine. They're all just means to a cruel end of a cruel process. The only advantage lethal injection has over any of them is that it makes us feel better about ourselves as a society. It lets us feel morally superior to the "uncivilized" Chinese shooting people in the head or Middle East heathens beheading people with cartoon sized swords.

As if it matters. As if the morality of killing people is determined by the method employed.

To see Ricketts go full Ahab so that his state can continue sanctioned homicide would be funny if the consequences weren't so grave. It's useful, though, to let the country see what rabidly pro-death penalty politicians really are: a group of people who are so enthusiastic about killing that they will devote themselves to concocting ways to circumvent the law they claim to care about upholding. It's almost like they're a little too excited about killing. You know, the kind of person who we generally consider a danger to society.

Recently I overheard on public transit two twenties/thirties Frat Bro types praising Carly Fiorina's appearance. I listened for a while and thought, well, they probably wouldn't do the same thing to a male candidate, although I could just as easily picture them making path of least resistance cracks about Trump's hair or Christie's turkey waddle and girth. In the end I contributed only "If you think she looks good now, you should have seen her when she was alive" before exiting the train. Should I have asked them why they were focusing on appearance with the only woman in the GOP race or suggested that they think about her issue positions rather than superficial factors? Probably. But here's the thing. I was tired, and ultimately talking about what Carly Fiorina thinks ("thinks") is about as interesting or relevant as talking about her face.

Imagine the following set of options for how you can spend the next hour of your life. You could push a round stone the size of a minivan up a steep incline. You could run up a staircase that never ends.

You could read the user manual and instructions for a selection of pop-up toasters. Or you could explain at length, point by point, why Ben Carson is insane or Carly Fiorina's ideas are not good ones.

Take your time.

I understand on an intellectual level why making cracks about the candidates' appearance or other superficial characteristics is, in the grand sense, Wrong. It makes me and anyone else who does it, by the most literal definition, a Bad Person.

The reason I do it sometimes, and the reason I don't get as bent out of shape as a lot of people do when I hear someone else do it, is that there is nothing I can imagine at this point in my life and in American politics that is more tedious, more of a waste of effort, or less engaging than explaining why the "ideas" presented by these candidates are stupid. I'm going to be honest; if my options are to point out that Chris Christie looks like an unemployed pipefitter from Bayonne, NJ or to explain, point by point, why his stale, thirty year old set of Republican talking points rephrased as policy positions is wrong, I'm going to pick the former more often than not.

Think of it this way. If I devoted this space to explaining that supply side economics doesn't work, starting wars is a bad idea, or opposition to gay marriage is hypocritical, Constitutionally unjustifiable, and ignorant, how interesting would that be for you to read? In the last 15 years how many times would you estimate you've read those arguments? How many times have you made them or explained this to someone unwilling or unable to understand them? How many sentences into that post would your eyes glaze over and your mouse begin poking around for something more interesting?

It's just too much effort to continue to take these people seriously. The leading GOP candidates are an actual reality TV troll, a clinically insane man who hears voices from god, a woman whose entire resume is a series of staggering failures in the corporate world, and George W. Bush's dumber brother. There are only so many times you can say "Hey everyone, I don't think cutting taxes on the wealthy is an effective economic strategy!" or "The things these candidates say seem incorrect and outrageous most of the time!" Their barrage of stupidity and falsehoods is too constant for anyone with a normal attention span to keep shooting down for very long.

We get it. I get it. You get it. These people are all goddamn insane, and the ones that aren't insane are dangerously stupid, and the ones that aren't insane or stupid are bloodless, craven sociopaths who will say anything if they think it will make morons vote for them.

Pointing that out over and over again is tedious and pointless. To engage them on the merits of their "ideas" – not a single one of which is of more recent vintage than about 1990, excepting the occasional new and completely insane theory they cook up for attention in this cacophony of monkey howls – adds as much to our intellectual lives as Chris Christie fat jokes, which is to say not a goddamn thing.

I hope you have a box of tissues ready. FBI Director James Comey, speaking to an audience of law enforcement personnel and their various hangers-on, explains that violent crime is higher in 2015 than in 2014 (except in all the cities where it isn't) because of the "Ferguson Effect." Is that the way that the increased militarization and use of force by police contributes to the overall tenor of violence in areas with existing crime problems? Because I agree, that certainly is something that should concern the FBI.

Oh. It turns out that The Ferguson Effect is police being too hesitant to do their job for fear of being caught on video and becoming the next YouTube sensation.

Americans of all stripes love playing the victim, be it in their personal lives or relative to their place in society.
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It is just heartbreaking, though, to think of all of our heroes behind the badge being unable to operate with impunity. Isn't this the same reactionary segment of society that falls back on "If you're not doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to worry about" when police behavior is put to scrutiny?

That one of the nation's top law enforcement officials doesn't see a problem with police complaining about being video recorded speaks to the systemic nature of the problem.
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They keep telling us it's "a few bad apples" when it's clear that the problem is systemic, part of both organizational thinking and behavior. I can't get enough of people making videos of cops, because without that we'd never hear of incidents like this or we would hear about them solely from the Official Version of events.

(Oh, why not.)

I won't pretend to be an authoritative source on the politics of countries other than the one in which I live, but like most Americans with an interest in politics I have paid some attention to the recent Canadian elections. Being friends with a bunch of Canadian Marxists doesn't hurt. Suffice it to say no one is doing cartwheels over the NDP's performance. All is not lost for the good people to the north, however. Harper and his Conservatives lost, unseated by Justin "Son of Pierre" Trudeau and his Liberal Party. I mean, the name sounds good. It's not quite what Americans would assume it is based solely on its moniker. It could generously be described as a center-left party, although in realistic (non-American) terms it is effectively a centrist party. Bill and Hillary would feel at home there, as would Tony Blair and others of the "New _____" mindset wherein "New" signifies "More like right-wing conservatives, but not as repugnant."

This will be hard to swallow for legitimate liberals or those even farther to the left, but man…that shit sells. Whatever portion of the electorate is not completely lost to the right wing noise and propaganda machine is likely to warm up to any party with a sorta-charming front man promising the weakest, least scary, least threatening to the status quo kind of liberalism. The message sounds Nice and the people delivering it don't look like bridge trolls, which is more than Tories/Republicans can say most of the time. The appeal of a sweet sounding, Liberalism Lite that takes trendy positions on issues like gay marriage and abortion while avoiding issues with sharp, nasty edges (poverty, racism, structural unemployment). And they're always eager to remind you that they're not those old fashioned "Tax & Spend Liberals" by proposing – co-opting from conservatives, really – issues like welfare reform, charter schools, or draconian cuts to social services.

Picture Hugh Grant as the foppish, effeminate fiancee of the charming working class girl, trying to fit in with her uncouth, low-class brothers by going on a hunting trip and killing a few animals. He figures if he shoots a deer they'll accept him; clearly he finds the exercise ridiculous, but he considers it necessary with no other obvious way to gain acceptance among people he looks upon with the gaze of an anthropologist. That's Jack Trudeau. That was Bill Clinton. That was Tony Blair. I don't like it any more than you do, but this shtick sells. And it's further evidence that after kicking the tires on every septuagenarian and no-name ex-Governor they can find, the Democratic Party is likely to circle back to Hillary Clinton in 2016. It's not that they think her brand of mushy centrism is great. They think she'll win, and there are enough people to whom that's all that matters to carry her through. What such campaigns lose on the far left (and it ain't much in the USA with no real leftist party to jump to) they gain in the center full of unmotivated, indistinct voters to whom the weakest tea will inevitably appeal the most.

Perhaps you've had the good fortune to avoid seeing this column by LA Times word-vomiter Chris Erskine entitled "Millennials, you literally cannot call yourselves adults until you take this pledge." If ever the title of an opinion column foreshadowed Paul Harvey levels of smug, corn-pone "advice" reinforcing Bootstrap Mythology, this is it. I "literally" had to close the browser when I read the title to steel myself before confronting the body of it. True to form, it offered a hodgepodge of Old Man Shouting at Cloud ("I am entitled to nothing.
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"), complaints that apply every bit as well to non-Millennials ("Just once, I will try driving without texting."), attempts at humor that make Family Circus look like a George Carlin album ("I will not consider the cilantro on my taco to be a vegetable."), cheap, tired stereotypes ("If I can't afford car insurance, I won't spend $20 a day on coffee."), and advice that nobody over 35 follows despite constantly giving it to The Youths ("I will not run up my credit cards.
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") On a scale of 1 to 10, this column is shit.

The author appears to believe that he is on solid intellectual footing because, as a 34 year old, he somehow "is" a millennial, whatever that term even means. The real problem is that this column, like so many opinion pieces that appeal to Common Sense or Telling It Like It Is, is just right-wing moralizing dressed up unconvincingly in a package that is supposed to speak to a broader audience.

Let me humbly propose a pledge that I'd like Mr.
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Erskine and anyone else with an urge to give saccharine advice to The Kids These Days to take. To be sure, there are some things about the current generation of young'ns worth criticizing; it is demonstrable, for example, that their attention spans are getting shorter and their grades are wildly inflated. But since the author didn't bother to do any research I'll play by the same rules. Whenever you're ready, take the Gin and Tacos "I Literally Cannot Call Myself a Not-Asshole Until I Take This Pledge" pledge:

The older I get the more I appreciate the tendency of humans to want to make things more interesting than they really are. This is part of the fundamental appeal of conspiracy theories, for example. Nineteen guys with box cutters are too tame an explanation for an event of the magnitude of 9/11 so we have to spice it up with some stock spy novel machinations. The world is rarely as interesting as it is in our imaginations and we try to close the gap.

For this and other reasons a popular rumor throughout the George W. Bush years was of family drama underlying that man's rise to the presidency. It was believed during the Reagan years that Jeb was the scion of the Bush family and George was little more than an embarrassing afterthought given a job with a baseball team to keep him busy and (hopefully) out of the way. When W sobered up, though, he quickly made his way in Texas politics and from the governor's mansion we know the rest of the story.
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Whisper campaigns about almost Shakespeareian levels of drama between the brothers intimated that Jeb, as The Serious One, deeply resented being passed over for his Party Boy brother. It's a neat, self-contained narrative and accordingly many people bought it. Hell, I bought it. It made perfect sense and George W's performance left little reason to doubt that his brother would indeed be more capable.

This is all interesting now that Jeb is finally having his big moment on the national stage with no brother or father to upstage him.
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We get to see him in all his splendor, and he is so terrible we have to remind ourselves repeatedly that, yes, this is it and, no, he's not gonna get any better. A nation and pundit class led to believe that the secret jewel of the Bush dynasty was about to shine are scrambling to concoct excuses for what we are seeing in this election. He's terrible. He's so terrible that he can't handle the intellectual might of Donald Trump. He's more terrible than anyone could have imagined, whisper campaign about his secret greatness or not. He is, dare we even say it, worse than George W.

It's safe to say that very few people saw that coming.

Nothing about him is redeeming.

His personality is classic "asshole neighbor / CPA" from Republican Central Casting with none of the fake Folksy Reg'lar Fella crap his brother pulled off. The ideas he puts forth are unimaginative and lightweight even by the standards of this horrendous GOP field. He has zero campaign instincts and he's forever putting his foot in his mouth ("Americans need to work harder" and "Stuff happens" in response to a mass killing, and we're still more than a year out from the election). He's not good on camera, he's not raising money appreciably better than the other candidates, and his debate performances have been embarrassing. I didn't expect him to be great. Nor did I expect him to have no redeeming qualities whatsoever as a candidate. He just seems like a dick. A guy you would go out of your way to avoid having to talk to in a social setting. The guy who only makes VP because his dad owns the company.

If he makes any headway in this race it will be a dark omen for the GOP, as anyone voting for him would be doing so strictly as a default vote of no confidence in the rest of the field. It could happen, but he's been so amazingly bad that he might even lose his grip on that role. I'd love to tell you I saw that coming, but we're in uncharted territory of ineptitude here.

A stray tale from the great Alaska adventure that I thought I had posted long ago but actually did not.

My idea of vacation is to load a rental vehicle with camping gear and drive for weeks on end.

For all practical purposes I live out of the car for that time. In short order it is full of dirty clothes, camping equipment saturated in various savory odors, half-finished or empty food containers, and anywhere from 50-100 cans of NOS depending on how long it has been since I departed. This is indescribably fun but results in certain negative externalities. One is that any police stop or border crossing becomes a very lengthy process, the latter especially. Think about it. You have a single male traveling alone in a rented vehicle with a disheveled interior and no discernible itinerary.

I fit every characteristic (except for whatever variety of unofficial racial profiling is in vogue at the moment) of someone driving around in a vehicle full of drugs.

Accordingly when I cross into or out of Canada I budget about 60-90 minutes for it. Even though I know that I have nothing illegal in the car, I understand and recognize why they have reason to think I might. It would do me no good whatsoever to pitch a fit. I just sit in the austere holding area (which always includes a compass…you know, to find Mecca. Because justice is colorblind.) and wait while they rifle through my possessions and check every panel on the vehicle for false compartments. It's just part of the cost of doing business.

In Denali I met an older volunteer park employee – white haired and presumably about 70 – who got to ranting about how difficult it is for him to get across the border when he makes his annual pilgrimage from Texas to Alaska for seasonal volunteer work.

Since this happens to me and I hadn't spoken to another human for a few days at the time, I engaged him in conversation. It turns out, as he explained in unwarranted detail, that he is, uh, a firearms enthusiast. The kind who spends every spare dime buying, in many cases from overseas, antique guns. He explained that since he is punctilious in following the rules of "the goddamn ATF" and "the fucking FBI" during these transactions, his fondness for firearms is a matter of record when his passport is scanned at a border crossing. I don't know if you've ever tried to drive into Canada as an American, but they *really* don't want you to bring a gun into the country. Like, they will ask you if you have any guns in the car so many times that you will begin to think it's a joke. So unsurprisingly the many foreign gun purchases that this old guy has made turned his border crossings, like mine, into long ordeals involving thorough vehicle searches.

What I could not figure is why this surprised him or felt justified in getting so angry about it. Is it not bleedingly, even painfully obvious that his history would be cause for reasonable suspicion that he had bought a gun while in another country? He repeated over and over the point that all of his purchases were 100% legal. Well, everything I do on vacation is legal as well. But a pattern of legal actions can sometimes raise eyebrows about illegal ones. It's not illegal to travel alone, to rent a car, to camp, or to cross the border in the goddamn middle of nowhere at 2:15 AM. But when all of those are combined, a border agent who is doing his or her job will look at me and think something might be up. If I were on the other side of the bulletproof glass, I would be suspicious of me too. Yet apparently when the 2nd Amendment is involved, individuals (especially when we factor in Whiteness and Maleness) apparently expect to be above suspicion.

It is somehow offensive, bordering on rage-inducing, that border officers might think that a man who owns more than a hundred guns might have guns on him or be buying or selling guns. It seems obvious to me; then again, I am not the kind of person who would be surprised that other people find me suspicious if I chose to own and talk about guns constantly.

I'm the last person in the field of political science who is qualified to hold court on political theory.
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Like most people trained in American politics I know the relevant philosophical touchstones of the people who wrote the Constitution – Locke, Hobbes, Mill, etc – thoroughly enough to avoid embarrassing myself and to teach it effectively in the context of non-theory courses. Accordingly I do know a couple of useful things.

One such nugget of knowledge is that nearly every one of the hundreds of competing definitions of terms like state and sovereignty boil down to, as Hobbes put it, a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.

That does not imply that individuals may never use force legitimately. Common law tradition back to the dawn of civilization recognizes, for example, that the individual can act in self defense when attacked. But as the state retains the right to determine whether an act of self defense is justified, even this is not a proper exception to the state monopoly. The reason that this idea is so central to the definition of a state or a legitimate, sovereign government is that if every individual or self-appointed group is able to determine for him- or herself when the use of force is justified and legitimate, then that's not a state. That's not a society. That's what Hobbes was referring to when he described the "State of Nature.

" Without a state monopoly on the use of force, the use of force becomes unpredictable to the individual. Whereas I can walk to work and feel reasonably confident that I will not be shot at random (note that this is not impossible, merely unlikely enough that I walk to work without a phalanx of personal bodyguards and a small arsenal of weapons to fend off highwaymen who might, in a term that almost certainly cannot be used in polite conversation anymore, Shanghai me) in a world in which everyone gets to decide when to use force without the threat of state retribution or punishment I can't do that. Like everyone else in society, as Hobbes explained so long ago, I would have to devote so much of my energy, resources, and existence to defending myself that I'd engage in no other productive activity. And despite my best efforts at self-defense, I'd learn that no man is an island when anarchy reigns and life would indeed be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

As I posted over a year ago during the Trayvon Martin trial, this is essentially what "Stand Your Ground" laws produce. Every individual is left to decide when he or she feels threatened enough to justify using force to defend themselves from a threat (real or imagined). And if we're all making that decision on our own, using our own criteria, and without the threat of sanction (As written, the laws make prosecution nearly impossible; what prosecutor could establish that I did not fear for my life if I insist stridently enough that I did, regardless of whether that fear was justified or rational?) then we are teetering on the edge of a very dangerous precipice here. The fantasy of gun enthusiasts is that everyone will go around armed, that Good Guys are easily distinguishable from Bad Guys, and that somehow people making this decision independently according to no objective standards will use lethal force judiciously and wisely. In a nation of 320,000,000 people that seems pretty likely, right?

In Michigan this week a woman with a legally permitted concealed handgun pulled out her weapon and blazed away at someone she believed she saw shoplifting as the purported thief drove away from a Home Depot store. This woman, who was judged by the state and the few mechanisms of screening in place to be competent to walk around with a loaded gun, is not smart or rational enough to have thought what a normal person might in that situation – Maybe write down the license plate and call 911?
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Maybe tell a store employee and let them handle it according to their established and well rehearsed corporate policy? No, her judgment was that it was necessary to respond to what she believed was a nonviolent petty property crime by firing several rounds at a moving vehicle, the consequences of which could have been disastrous in any number of ways. And this is in a society in which the threat of sanction exists. She can be, and might be, prosecuted for her wanton and irresponsible actions. That wasn't enough to make her pause or to knock any sense into her.

The more people we arm, the more we are forced implicitly to trust that the people with guns will make just decisions about when and how to use them. Forgive me for saying that absolutely nothing about the American concealed carry gun enthusiast as a class rouses merits faith. Advocates can claim until they're blue in the face that most of them are sane and rational and Good; whether that is true is irrelevant. Ninety-five percent isn't good enough in this case, leaving tens of thousands of unstable and untrustworthy knuckleheads out there armed and ready to act out their Rambo fantasies. And in the long term it is not alarmist to ask how a society is supposed to survive when one of the defining powers of the state is privatized.